Farley Thomas

Farley Thomas is the co-founder and CEO of Manageable, an EdTech firm helping managers to become competent and confident coaches to their teams. Manageable does this through a tech-enabled, data-driven learning experience that is based on the science of language learning. Fundamentally this demands real practice in the flow of work, inspired by positive role models and reliable feedback.

Before founding Manageable in 2020, Farley ran his own leadership coaching and CEO advisory practice for six years, working with companies of all sizes across industry sectors. Farley’s success as a coach, mentor and business builder is based on a 20-year financial-services career, which ultimately involved planning, executing and scaling numerous global business initiatives and products at HSBC. He built out the bank’s European mutual fund business from the ground up, turning it into a top 10 distributor of cross-border mutual funds. He was the global lead for HSBC’s Exchange Traded Fund initiative, which saw the bank successfully enter this significant product area for the first time in Europe and Asia.

Farley held a variety of roles in HSBC’s asset management division, including being global head of marketing, product, sales and business development, all roles that didn’t exist before he filled them. He served on the Board of HSBC’s main asset management entity. He also spent four years as a Managing Director in charge of a £1bn business in the global capital markets division of the bank.

While he relishes the challenges and hard work of leading startup, he also enjoys family time, school drop-offs and pick-ups, cooking Indian food, cycling everywhere, devouring business books, and using his squash skills badly on tennis courts.